


On Marriage

by darktreesbigvoices



Category: Mission: Impossible, Mission: Impossible (Movies)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-15
Updated: 2021-01-15
Packaged: 2021-03-13 09:02:12
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 3,797
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28775772
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/darktreesbigvoices/pseuds/darktreesbigvoices
Summary: They grow old, after Fallout.
Relationships: Benji Dunn/Ethan Hunt, Ethan Hunt/Julia Meade
Comments: 2
Kudos: 4





	1. Chapter 1

They have grown old together, Ethan thinks fuzzily. Benji is fiddling with his unlit cigarette. Benji doesn’t smoke, but he likes to have something in his hands. If he could have a portable keyboard in his hands at all times, Benji would be happy. But he has the cigarette.

“How much morphine did they put you on?” Benji asks, and his voice, to Ethan, is indistinct and far-away, like he is talking to him over a com. Ethan shakes his head and continues staring numbly at the ceiling. The ceiling is canvas.

Gradually, he begins to hear sounds. He couldn’t before, not ones outside of the medical tent, (for instance, he could hear Julia’s voice on the other side of the tent, talking to someone, but not Ilsa yelling something to Luther just a few paces outside), but they begin to cater some meaning to him.  
There is rain, apparently. It is raining. It rains.  
Lake of the rains.  
Benji coughs into his fist and pats Ethan’s shoulder absently, and Ethan wishes he wouldn’t. It is a mark, a sign, of living together, of comfort, he doesn’t want Julia to see. He doesn’t want her to know that he has been living with Benji for the past six years. He doesn’t want her to suspect that he has grown old with someone other then her.  
She says ‘move on’ and he cannot. He accepts that she is happy, that she wants him to be, but Benji is probably the last person she is thinking of.

* * *

“I’m sorry.” Ethan mumbled weakly.

“For what, Ethan?” Julia asked. She kept trying to look at him, into his eyes. Ethan kept his eyes hidden, dodging her looks like a scared child, his face numb and aching. Julia sighed and kept applying the ointment to the burns on his hands.

Ethan stated the facts, hoping that it would take away the sting of what he was going to say. “I’ve been living with Benji for the last six years. I want to keep living with him-if that implies marriage or not, I don’t know. The things I’ve done…you don’t try and sleep alone, after that. And he’s a lonely person, and I love him.”

Julia’s brows came together, and her lips pursed. “I have Eric, Ethan. I thought we had moved on.”

“I know.”

“You said it would be easier for both of us.”

“I know.”

“Well,” Julia sighed again. “If you know, then why are you sorry? Ethan, I love you, I think I always will, but I am not sorry that I met Eric. He’s…stable. And from what I know about Benji, he’s the same.”

“You’re stable, Julia.”

“Compared to you, anyone is.” Julia said kindly, and stroked Ethan’s hair. “Listen, remember what I said about wanting you to be happy?”

“Yes.”

“I meant it, I really did.”

* * *

“What about Ilsa? What about her?” Benji asked, having to speak quietly in the crowded bar, leaning close. “I’ve seen you two look at each other. Why’d you chose me and not her? You could live together.”

Ethan shrugged. “I’ve known you longer. I trust you.”

“You don’t trust her?”

“No.” Ethan smiled. “We’re too much alike. She’s playing ten games of chess at once, instead of just one. She’s all over the board, in every honey pot, every pie. I couldn’t trust her even if I tried. I want to, but I can’t.”

“But you love her, don’t you?” Benji grunted, his ears turning violently red as he swigged back another shot of whiskey. He fingered the silver bracelet on his left wrist, which he wore over his watch like a medical alert plaque.

Ethan shook his head. “We’re alike.” He said again.

“So you’re not in love with her?”

“No.”

“Oh.” Benji looked at him and then dropped his eyes. He edged away his shot glass with the tips of his fingers. “Does she know that you don’t?”

“Yes. We’ve been together though.”

“What?” Benji’s eyes grew wide, making the mismatched colors more pronounced. “Where?”

“A showing of Madama Butterfly, in the second act. Bathroom, first floor.”

“Jesus. Was it…”

“Yes.” Ethan said soberly. “It was fantastic.”

* * *

The ring is on Ethan’s right first finger, next to Julia’s. Benji’s name is engraved on the inside. It is silver and it has a slightly jagged face. “To mark up the cunts that punch you,” Benji had said, “in the field, I mean. I don’t want my ring to be for nothing, you know? You can say it’s for protection. Like one of those lipsticks that’s really a pepper spray.”  
Benji’s bracelet has a silver chain and a plaque with Ethan’s name engraved on the inside. Ethan gave Benji the bracelet when they were walking home from work. It was cold, and the wind was like ice. They had stopped on the bridge so Benji could start one of the filter cigarettes he had started smoking. He had had a hard day. His hands were shaking, and Ethan had taken one of his hands and squeezed.  
Benji, his collar around his red ears, smoked tiredly and leaned on the railing. Ethan saw by the light of the street lamp that his hair was starting to turn grey around the temples. “Benji,” he said, “I want to keep living with you.”  
Benji nodded as if this was no suprise. “I do too.”  
Ethan smiled and pressed the bracelet into Benji’s hand, feeling his callused hand close around it. Benji hugged him hard, and Ethan had felt him shaking and he had rubbed his back, feeling relieved.  
They were going to grow old together.

* * *


	2. In Which They Are Imperfect

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Small moment at the Deli down the street, somewhere in marriage-land 20-something.

Benji stands in the deli and stares at the huge hog head that probably the size of his own head. He is too drunk for this. He shouldn’t be outside at all, really. Too many sleeping pills and too much scotch, but he’s tired, hasn’t slept in a week. He called into work yesterday, and he feels like a loser. He is forty three years old, and has no real coping skills. He should be single, or dead, or single and dead.

But there’s Ethan.

To be fair Ethan doesn’t look much better, but he’s a good enough actor to make people think that he has a good reason to walking around with possible-insane-person-Benji, who smells like burnt wiring and drink and sweat, in a deli at one in the morning. He looks capable. Sane.

Benji’s hands are shaking. He balls them up in his coat pockets and shoves his nose down into his collar, feeling the icy zipper against his skin.

Maybe it’s the suit.

Ethan has a suit on, and a proper coat, and gloves. Benji knows vaguely that he should be wearing a suit, but the ones he has stored in his closet all have blood on various, notable parts of them, so he dressed for comfort, which meant the parka he has owned since Oxford and the gloves with the holes in them, and the blue scarf he bought god knows when.

He must look homeless.

The hog seems to blink. Benji wrinkles his nose back, tears spilling out of his dry, reddened eyes.

Maybe he’s getting sick. A cold, or the flu. For a moment, Benji thinks he can feel an ominous twist in his stomach, but it subsides disappointingly.

Ethan wonders back to him and puts his hands frankly in Benji’s coat pockets, holding his hands artlessly. “Home?” He asks. He is bouncing on his heels and his eyes have that bright, sharp look to them.

“Are you manic?” Benji says. Even though he feels like shit, he is still willing to be the caretaker in this thing they have, how typical. Ethan shakes his head and smiles at him, a reassuring smile, a very, very manic smile. Benji squeezes Ethan’s hands, which are still in his pockets. “This must be why you go married to me, it explains why we do things like this.”

“Like what?” Ethan stops bouncing.

“Like you bloody—holding my fuckin’ hands…” Benji half yells, starting off strong and then trailing off, too tired for this, way too tired, “Home, yeah, let’s go home. Who did you see?”

“What?”

“Well, you must have seen somebody.” Benji says sullenly. “You were gone for near on five minutes.”

“Hm.” Ethan says distractedly, which isn’t really an answer. They walk towards the exit. Benji slips his hand out of his pocket and lets it dangle deadly in Ethan’s grip. “I didn’t see anyone, actually, I-uh, I was in the wine section, thought you were there with me, but you weren’t.”

“No.” Benji agrees gloomily.

“I looked around and you weren’t there-oh god-“

It’s snowing.  
Benji stops in his tracks. Ethan keeps walking, and tugs reassuringly on his arm. “C’mon.”

“It’s beautiful.” Benji breaths. The white flakes remind him of jazz, of coffee, of warm fires, of Christmas, of colored lights, of the cold nipping feeling in the back of his nose, mostly of Ethan; who he has spent six Christmas’s with, and of warm apple sauce. Down the street, someone starts to sing Solitary Man in a passionate, loud, tuneful voice that is thick with drink. A few others, maybe his drinking mates, join in.  
Benji blinks up at the white flakes and watches his breath fog upwards into the street light, once, twice, smiling to himself.

“Coming?” Ethan asks impatiently. He is like this sometimes, manic or whatever, anxious, facade cracking. It usually means he’s had a bad day at work, or he has new meds. It’s his coping mechanism. Gets in a shouting match in the s store, injures himself in the field, stumbles over his words and laughs too much in-between sentences. His nose is red.  
Benji has snow his beard. He follows him down the street. He feels cheered, in a way. He’s still a loser, but maybe he isn’t such a loser, and he has Ethan, and that’s ok.

* * *


	3. Days of Our Grace Returning

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ilsa arrives back from a mission with a broken nose. Ethan feels conflicted.

Outside the flat, the rain had started to tear down the last of the brilliant leaves from the sidewalk-clutching trees. The limbs seemed to gasp, pulling the smoggy air into their cells by meager degrees, preparing to hold their breath until spring came. The rain was loud and incessant, banging on the windows, and sometimes lightning would flash over the roofs, and thunder would follow.  
Benji took off his glasses and set them on the bedside table. “Is there someone at the door?” He asked.

“I think you should come see, Benji.” Ethan said softly, and he put a hand on Benji’s shoulder and shepherded him into the living room, where Ilsa was laying, bandaged arm and unsmiling, on the couch.

“Jesus wept.” Benji said muddily. He poured himself a gin and tonic and drank, mouth sour, before he spoke again. “Are you ok? Need a medic?” He glanced at Ilsa’s bandaged arm and her broken nose.

“I’m alright now.” Ilsa said. “I didn’t mean to intrude.”

“That’s fine.” Ethan said firmly. “We haven’t seen you in almost a year. Wasn’t hard to guess what you’ve been doing. What happened?”

Ilsa sighed. “I was in Lebanon.”

“An’ that’s all you can say?” Benji asked.

“Yes.”  
Benji looked at Ethan, arms crossed, eyebrows raised, and Ethan shook his head. He started to tap his fingers on the kitchen counter, a slow rolling motion, and then checked the lock on the door. It was still locked. “Did anyone follow you?”

“No, no. I don’t think so. They jumped me around 55th street. I just got off the plane.” Ilsa shook her head and felt gingerly at her smashed nose. Benji put down his drink and forced himself into “field doctor” mode. He sat down

beside her and tilted Ilsa’s head back. “Can you breath through it?”

Ilsa tried. “No.”

“I’ll get you a pill. You couldn’t have picked a better time, love, I was just going to sleep.”

Ethan retrieved the gun from behind the painting of Dublin in Rain in the hallway, and Benji made tea. Ilsa sat silently on the couch, her hands prayer-like between her knees, her back bent. She kept wiping her face; the tissues, seeped with blood and tears, piling up on the cushions and over flowing onto the floor.

“How is it?” Benji asked.

“It’s ok.” Ilsa looked at Benji’s wrist questioningly. “I…talked to Luther. Just after I got off the plane. Tried to catch up on everything.” Benji nodded, not taking it all in, not realizing until she said discreetly: “I hope you two are happy.”

“We are. Very.” Benji cleared his throat. “Sometimes I don’t know if it’s all in my head, and then I look at him.”

“He’s a very loving man.” Ilsa said. She looked out at the flat lights down the street, at the street, at the rain.

“Do you want a shower?” Benji asked awkwardly. Ilsa nodded and rose, keeping her hands cradle-like under her elbows.

In the darkness of the hallway, Benji looks terrible. Red rimmed eyes, graying face. Ethan thinks of things to say in the passing five seconds it takes for Ilsa, followed by Benji, to move past him, and says none of them. But Ilsa knows. He can tell by the way she stares at the first finger of his right hand. And Benji shows Ilsa to the shower and then reappears, frowning heavily, one hand rubbing his face and eyes. “Jesus, her nose…I feel bad, you know?”

“About her nose?”

Benji nods.

Ethan remembers the showing of Madama Butterfly, the souring golden facet fixtures, the heavy velvet of Ilsa’s nut brown hair, the taste of her in his mouth, and how many scars she had hidden under her dress, and it hits him like a train. Like the sky falling in, vanilla. Like a fucking heart attack. He hides it well, this sudden mania, this displacement from reality, because the world felt like it was ending quite suddenly, and all he could smell was le gemme irina and all he could hear was Un bel di verdejo, and he is sitting on the bed that he has shared with Benjamin Dunn for the last seven years, and it is raining.

Thunder sounds, once, far away.  
Ilsa is drying her hair. She is wearing one of Benji’s sweaters, and a pair of his sweat pants. Her nose is swollen and red. It hits him again, differently this time. They look the same. They have the same color hair, their eyes are both greenish blue, an undecided grey. They have the same size feet. They could be twins. Ethan stares dully at the long scar across her upper underarm, reaching from her armpit to her elbow.

“This isn’t the first time.” Ilsa says, and then again without emotion: “My face usually heals so nicely…”

Ethan starts cracking his knuckles, his only tell, usually repressed in the same place he puts junk food and skipping his morning run. He doesn’t care if she sees. “I asked you…earlier. Don’t turn this on me. Please.”

“Earlier meaning nearly three years ago? At the opera?”

“Yes.”

“Well…’earlier’ you said you weren’t in love with me. I hope that’s still true, Mr. Hunt. God help us if you fall for anyone except him, I think you would do something rash.”

“What are you implying?” Ethan asks, detached.

“You love him.” Ilsa states, and what she says next sounds less like a threat and more like advice. “Just remember that people can use that.”

* * *


	4. Things of Note

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Married life, and general patterns and ticks.

Benji is cutting onions. He has already sustained many wounds, and his fingers are bandaged at odd angles on his knuckles and fingertips. Ethan walks morosely into the hallway, his eyes burning incessantly, his nose running, and then paces back like a tiger in a cage, his hands compulsively smoothing the front of his shirt down, again and again, his eyes looking at nothing between the floor and the couch.

Even when he smiled, Ethan’s eyes were an angry and frustrated undecided hazel, stubbornly blue in flashing lights, and olive in dark hallways. They were faintly manic at the best of times, and sometimes so anxious and tense that his smiles appeared insincere, and people would regard him as slightly insane, possibly dangerous, deranged.  
Ethan knew this about himself, and did what he could to combat this phenomena with downward sloping inflections, open body language, and bright charm. It pained him to know that some regarded him as a dangerous man, and it made him distrustful of compliments, gifts, and praise, because he was convinced that they were as insincere as his smiles supposedly where.  
He was loved by a handful of people, Luther, Julia, Benji, Ilsa, but if Ethan was to go into a anonymous convenience store and buy a bottle of milk, the cashier would edge away from him imperceptibly and not meet his eyes, leaving Ethan to fill the silence with levity and friendliness until he could push the glass door into the cold bitter air of late November.

“You got the milk?” Benji asked. Ethan slid the carton over to him over the counter. “Want me to do that?”  
Benji nodded grimly and wrapped his bleeding thumb in a dishtowel. The cut was deep and the towel was spotted in minutes while he watched Ethan finish dicing the tomatoes with deft movements of his hands. “You’re so fucking capable.” Benji said enviously.

“I used to cook for Julia.” Ethan said as explanation. “Can you put the milk in the fridge, please?”

Benji did, and leaned his forehead against the cold rubber of the fridge lining for a moment. It felt like raw fish.

Benji’s hands would shake, sometimes uncontrollably. His eyes were mismatched colors, one muddy brown, the other green. He sometimes smiled so distractedly at things or observations that he came off as distant and aloof, and this was one of the reasons he had never married. His eyes teared up at things Ethan would consider small and irrelevant, a dead dog on the side of the road, a mangled cherry tree being cut down in the park, a gunshot in the distance, an ambulance roaring down the main-street towards the elementary school. He had a habit of writing down obscure German verbs on scraps of napkin, optimistic and hopeful, assured of their value, awed by the strange sounds. He would boil water and forget to turn the stove off, wondering into the living room, his fingers carding through his beard, watching the watery sky. He loved rain, and the smell of it. He would awake in the night and listen to Ethan’s calm breathing, smell his sweat, and feel his arm around his neck.

* * *


	5. Coda

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The end, which changes nothing and everything.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for being so heavy on the symbolism...

There is no shock wave to the explosion, only a black cloud of smoke raising over the buildings. Ash does not fall, only snow. The sky is still a deep grey.

Ethan reaches mutely for the thermos with the hand he hasn’t keeping wrapped in his coat, and Benji gives it to him. “Did it work?” He croaks.

“Yes. You did it.”

“Tell him about the timer.” Luther says from across the room. Benji gets up and closes the window, shutting it firmly, taking another minute to look at the plume of smoke, dun-colored now, stretching upwards like a mangled arm. He goes back to Ethan’s side and sits down next to him on the hard concrete floor. “There was a timer. On the bomb. You had six seconds.”  
Luther chuckles. “You crazy bastard.”  
Ethan tries to laugh along, but he ends up wheezing. He rolls over and spits blood and one of his molars onto the floor. It looks like a piece of marble, bloody and single and Benji swears that he sees it steaming, just as their mouths steam in the cold, the room is that icy. Benji hoists him up by the armpits, and Luther supports Ethan the rest of the way and he carry him back to the van.

The snow is all but buried the van. Up to the tires, it sits in white. It takes ten minutes to start.  
Luther drives slowly, cruising along back alleys and through underpasses, humming something under his breath.  
Ethan is bloody and there is ash in his hair, but it is Benji who is shivering and clenching his teeth together to keep them from chattering. Ethan picks a fluff of ash from his hair and sprinkles it over Benji’s shoulder, then he lets his arm fall and grins sadly at him. Levity.

“Don’t you fuckin’ cry, don’t you dare.” Benji mumbles to him. “Ya fuckin’ heathen.”

“Benji.” Ethan says, his voice breaking. “What?” Benji looks meaningfully at Luther, worried. He rubs his eyes on the back of his hand, and looks back at Ethan. “What?”  
Ethan unwraps his right hand. His first finger and it’s middling brother have been reduced to stumps. They look like raw hamburger. Julia’s ring is a circle of burned and blackened metal on his ring finger. Benji’s ring is gone. “I had to press the button.” Ethan apologizes.

Benji hugs him tightly. “That’s alright. I was gettin’ tired of being married to you.”

“Too boring?”

“No. Never. Just kind of weird sometimes.”

“I like ‘weird sometimes’s.”

“I know.”

“I can get another ring, Benji.”

“You don’t have to.”

“Alright.”

  
They have been married for a certain amount of time that Benji is too afraid to admit. It was almost painfully good to not be lonely anymore, to have someone to hug when things got bad, someone to make hot drinks in the morning before the sun was up and it was too cold to get out of bed, someone who’s love language was literally “give me those parts of you that hurt, and I will carry them”, someone who believed in him. It had also been stifling, exhausting, keeping up with Ethan, who got up at five am every morning for a run, who never had a day off, who always seemed to have energy, who was always too good for you, too hyped up, too manic, five hours of sleep every night and nothing to eat and saying everything with his eyes and not talking and having shouting matches in public with strangers because he was angry and sad and deeply distrusting and tired. Tired like a horse is tired after riding all night full out. Tired like Benji was nearly chronically.

“What about the papers?” Benji asks.

“I don’t know. What do you want to do?”

Benji thinks about Ilsa; her face mostly, when she looked at Ethan. And about Ethan’s face when he looked at her. “I think we need some time off, what do you think?”

“What the hell is that?” Ethan asks, and laughs, and then he is asleep.

* * *

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I liked to leave the amount of time that Ethan and Benji were married ambiguous, which was why I did not include the exact years. Part of me wanted to say six months, and part of me wanted it to be for six years. I also wanted to convey that Ethan losing a finger was the only real reason they stopping being married, that they did not have a fight or anything like that. I hope someone out there enjoyed this work. Thanks for reading!


End file.
